Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Interviewing: Unstructured and Semistructured 247
2. Human memory is fragile, although it’s clearly easier to remember some things
than others.
Cannell et al. (1961) found that the ability to remember a stay in the hospital
is related to the length of the stay, the severity of the illness that lands you
there, and whether or not surgery is involved. It’s also strongly related to the
length of time since discharge. Cannell and Fowler (1965) found that people
report accurately 90% of all overnight hospital stays that happened 6 months
or less before being interviewed.
It’s easy for people to remember a rare event, like surgery, that occurred
recently. But, as Sudman and Schwarz (1989) point out, if you ask people to
think about some common behavior going back months at a time, they probably
use estimation rules. When Sudman and Schwartz asked people ‘‘How
many [sticks] [cans] of deodorant did you buy in the last six months?’’ they
started thinking: ‘‘Well, I usually buy deodorant about twice a month in the
summer, and about once a month the rest of the year. It’s now October, so I
suppose I must have bought 10 deodorants over the last six months.’’ And then
they say, ‘‘10,’’ and that’s what you write down.
3. Interviews are social encounters. People manipulate those encounters to whatever
they think is their advantage.
Adolescent boys tend to exaggerate, and adolescent girls tend to minimize,
reports of their own sexual experience (see Catania et al. 1996). Expect people
to overreport socially desirable behavior and to underreport socially undesirable
behavior. (See deMaio [1984] for a review of the social desirability
effect.)
4. People can’t count a lot of behaviors, so they use rules of inference.
In some situations, they invoke D’Andrade’s ‘‘what goes with what’’ rule
(1974) and report what they suppose must have happened, rather than what
they actually saw. Freeman et al. (1987) asked people in their department to
report on who attended a particular colloquium. People who were usually at
the department colloquium were mentioned as having attended the particular
colloquium—even by those who hadn’t attended (and see Shweder and D’Andrade
1980).
Reducing Errors: Jogging Informants’ Memories
Sudman and Bradburn (1974) distinguish two types of memory errors: simply
forgetting and reporting that something happened a month ago when it